Tag Archives: Alabama

GULF SHORES, Alabama — BP launched its new television advertising campaign this week touting its commitment to the Gulf Coast’s post-oil spill recovery, and a small group of anti-BP protesters are enjoying some extra exposure.

In the minute-long ad’s brief segment showing the Shrimp Festival, crowds line the Gulf Shores beachfront under clear skies. On the beach, beyond the festival grounds, the small group can be seen.

In an email to fuelfix.com, Michele Harmon, who is associated with the coalition, said she noticed cameras panning the scene from the roof of a nearby restaurant.

“I, like the rest of the protesters, assumed they were media filming the crowds at the festival,” Harmon said. “When they panned the cameras our way, we made sure they knew we were there, in hopes of getting media coverage.”

Kim McCuiston of Foley, another organizers of the event, told the Press-Register at the time that the Oct. 15 rally was an attempt to tell people that not enough had been done to clean the Gulf since the spill.

In Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina, new laws have been signed that represent the toughest crackdown on illegal immigrants – the vast majority of whom are Hispanics – in America. They give the police sweeping new powers and require them, and employers, to check people’s immigration status. In Alabama, they even make helping illegal immigrants, by giving them a lift in a car or shelter in a home, into a serious crime. For many, the laws echo the deep south’s painful history of segregation, sending out a message to people of a different colour: you are not wanted here.

“That is exactly right,” said Andrew Turner, a lawyer with the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Centre. “We view it within the context of the history of the deep south. It is using the law to push out and marginalise an ethnic minority.”

The new laws’ defenders deny that. They are merely enforcing the law, they say. Their problem is not with immigrants, but with those who came to America illegally. They say the laws are colour-blind and aimed at making sure everyone obeys the same rules and does not cheat the system.

Yet illegal immigrants have become a fundamental part of the American system. Huge swaths of the economy rely on the cheap labour they provide.

The article points out an important part of “illegal” immigration that is often referred to in the overall narrative. That is that undocumented workers have “become a part” of the American system overall. The mainstream accounts of this often even point to the drive for cheep labor by capital as the source of the “problem” here, yet they continue to allow reactionary rhetoric dominate the discourse and put the blame on those coming here to find exploitative conditions of work.

The only way to fight this framework and empower undocumented workers is to build a movement that fights back. And this movement is currently underway in much of the South.

Alabama recently passed a new anti-immigrant law that many have described as “more harsh” than the controversial anti-immigrant law in Arizona that essentially promotes racial profiling (this argument is focused on the fact that folks can be questioned for being “suspected of” being an undocumented worker). Georgia recently passed a similar law, making the South the center of the immigration debate.

As usual, both sides of the “mainstream” debate fall short of getting to the real issues at heart: the real manifestations of racism, and international labor relations (see NAFTA as an important variable to immigration itself). Even the “liberal” arguments against these laws are full of sentiments like “well immigrants do the jobs no one else wants to do for that price.” This line of logic is just as problematic as the more “overtly racist” arguments by the far-Right, in that the “servant class” role for undocumented workers is seen as justified or not problematic itself.

Florida also recently attempted to pass a similar law, but the state legislature as not unified and faced a strong activist response (with the Florida Capitol looking a lot like the halls of the Wisconsin Capitol for a few days).

These laws need to be fought with a mass movement based on solidarity and workers power.

This is a great, short talk by Dante Strobino from the Workers World Party national conference. He discusses the specific conditions facing the South, as well as the centrality of developing the revolutionary movement in this part of the country if we are to overthrow capitalism. – hastenawait

Although hundreds of Southerners have joined the Communist Party, USA, many of them have never had a sit-down discussion with a party leader. Vice-Chairperson Scotty Marshall and I plan to confront that problem with an organizing tour of Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana November 11-24.

The New Members Committee of CPUSA sent out an invitation: “Interest in the Communist Party, USA is rising across the South. We have gotten inquiries about our party, our program, our philosophy and our strategy, from all the Southern states. Many are asking how to join and become active. Many also want to know how we are organized and how to form clubs or study groups. Many have also participated in our on-line webinars and discussions. Because of this interest, and because we are seeing clusters of inquiries from areas of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas and Kentucky, we are planning a two week trip through these areas….”

Responses from Southerners were immediate:

“I would strongly urge you to visit Mobile. I know a few of us would love to meet and talk over drinks and good topics.”

“Please do contact me when you make it into Mobile. There aren’t many people to my knowledge that are educated about CPUSA, I’m really looking forward to changing this and becoming more informed myself.”

“I live in Arkansas. You guys should come through Little Rock.”

“Hello from Arkansas! I would Love to meet with you if you come. I live In Hot Springs. Let me know if there is any thing I can do to help on your trip.”

“Where will you be in Kentucky? Thank you for all your hard work!”

“I want to become involved in the activities of the Party again and you can
instruct me on what you might want me to accomplish to prepare for the Southern tour to visit here in Louisville.”

“Yes! I would definitely be interested in meeting with CP-USA when you come through Kentucky.”

“I am trying to get as many as possible to meet with Scott Marshall and Jim Lane in one location, most likely my city of Louisville.”

“If you could, let me know when you’d be available in Louisville Kentucky. And heck you can even give me a call if you like.”

“Howdy, I’d love to meet up. I live in Louisville, KY. I don’t know of anybody else that would be interested in meeting up, but… I might be able to get one or two other people together for a powwow.”

“I have a friend who is very interested in meeting up, and has a place to hold a meeting. Anyway, you’ve got a place to meet and speak here in Louisville.”

“I would like to meet some locals interested in organizing. Will you all be in New Orleans?”

“I would like to be able to get in contact with more people from Baton Rouge and discuss coming together and starting something here. Any information you could give me would be great.”

“I am interested in meeting with you. I live in Memphis. I am not a current member, but am interested in opportunities to find out more about the Party’s work and possibly become a member.”

“I would love to meet with any or all of you to discuss what work you’re doing and how I might be able to help. If you are in Memphis please let me know.”

“We’re both living around the Memphis area, and we’re very interested in meeting with the two of you. We’re extremely enthusiastic to get acquainted with fellow comrades within the national party. Thank you so much for sending this to me.”

“I am interested in joining CPUSA. I live in Memphis. I would like to meet with Scott and Jim if they pass through here.”

Scotty and I have wanted to carry out this tour for some time. We’re hoping to help progressive Southerners come together into regular CPUSA clubs. CPUSA has a rich tradition in the South, and there are a number of longtime comrades scattered here and there. Additionally, young people are more and more realizing that capitalism has no solutions for them and are seeking information from CPUSA.

In addition, Scotty and I intend to report regularly to CPUSA publications so that all progressives in America can better understand Southerners and one another. Our hearts are really into this trip! We depart Dallas and head toward Little Rock November 11!

In 2000 the tombs of Lynyrd Skynyrd front man Ronnie Van Zant and one of his band mates were vandalized near their hometown of Jacksonville, Florida. For uncertain reasons, the vandals had attempted to remove part of Van Zant’s cremated remains. Many speculated on whether the perpetrators were doing it out of disrespect or adoration. Either situation seemed plausible, with the ubiquity in that band’s hometown of raging drunk “free bird” criers and their distraught and rebellious children alike. For many southerners in Lynyrd Skynyrd’s heyday, Van Zant’s message was a sort of vindication. Unavoidably embedded in the spirits of the times around them, many of the young whites in the South wanted neither to allow for the bigoted system to triumph nor to pander to northern paternalism, such as that criticized by Van Zant and company in “Sweet Home Alabama,” his tongue-in-cheek response to Neil Young from 1974.

The message seemed clear enough: We can do it ourselves, “Montgomery has the answer.” In fact, it is precisely in the song’s lyrics expressing the progressives’ collective national disdain for pro-segregation Alabama governor George Wallace that the particularizing blow against Young is delivered:

“Well I heard Mister Young sing about her
Well, I heard ole Neil put her down
Well, I hope Neil Young will remember
A southern man don’t need him around anyhow…”

Young, for his part, adored the independent solidarity expressed by his musical counterparts. If the “southern man” was thus vindicated, both reunited with his comrades to the north and unimpeded by their economic and cultural dominance, then the formula for a certain change had been created. Perhaps the most important example of that change can be found today not in the change to unity between southern freedom riders and northern student protestors, but in the change in Governor Wallace to a particular sort of born-again Christianity. Although he publically claimed that a 1972 assassination attempt had changed his perspective on race, one cannot help but think that Wallace’s future political ideology – one thriving if not predominant today – had already been arrived at by Young and Van Zant. As the man who had once physically stood in the path of federal troops at the University of Alabama to prevent its integration began to seek the black vote, those in the young white vote had already begun to seek new terms for their place in American society. This new ideology, shared by Van Zant and Wallace alike, came to be known as “states’ rights”.

“States’ rights” had long been the calling card of pro-segregationists in the south as it had been of their pro-slavery civil-war era ancestors. Opposition to the federalist system has never been exclusively southern nor exclusively conservative as it is most familiar to us today, but what was unique about Wallace’s political craftsmanship was its ability to so thoroughly alter the entire nation’s future. Arriving at an appropriate time, the populist call to smaller government has become what has been called the “Southernization” of American politics, and of America in general. As the lyrics go: “Now Watergate does not bother me/ Does your conscience bother you?” So it is that the striking out against the paternalistic north has become the striking out against the paternalistic federal state, where we’re all, with a healthy dose of defiance, going back to Sweet Home Alabama.

It is no wonder then that for some of a later generation in the South the figure of Ronnie Van Zant would loom so ominously over them as an unbearable paternalistic symbol itself. Thus the attempt to steal his ashes begs the Lacanian questions: Was this a vulgar attempt to capture a relic of phallic significance on the part of the Skynyrd generation? Or, was this an attack on the Primordial Signifier (the Name-of-the-Father)? For the sake of psychoanalytic questioning, both questions are important. What is the contemporary political ideology without its phallus, the “southern man”? Maybe even more important, if it is the father’s phallic signification that is being attacked, what must the continued import of such signification be if the ultimate result of an oppositional struggle is not to result in psychosis, lacking the symbolic connection between the imaginary and real orders? The threatening echo that the “southern man don’t need [one] around anyhow” continues to ring true with the surreal comic and horrific qualities of Slim Pickens riding an atom bomb to oblivion.

The mystery of the would-be grave robbers still continues unsolved. Ronnie Van Zant’s remains have since been relocated, allegedly buried in an impenetrable concrete vault. They rest in Jacksonville’s Memorial Park in the newly gentrified, liberal- and art-promoted Riverside neighborhood, the recent site of racist graffiti bearing tea-party sympathies. His final resting place remains unmarked.